260 BIG ANIMALS 



which makes this vast and varied assortment of gigantic 

 species seem all reducible to a common form. As a matter 

 of fact, however, there are several dozen colossal marine 

 animals now sporting and spouting in all oceans, as distinct 

 from one another as the camel is from the ox, or the 

 elephant from the hippopotamus. Our New Zealand 

 Berardius easily beats the ichthyosaurus ; our sperm whale 

 is more than a match for any Jurassic European deinosaur ; 

 our rorqual, one hundred feet long, just equals the dimen- 

 sions of the gigantic American Atlantosaurus himself. 

 Besides these exceptional monsters, our bottleheads reach 

 to forty feet, our California whales to forty-four, our 

 hump-backs to fifty, and our razor-backs to sixty or seventy. 

 True fish generally fall far short of these enormous 

 dimensions, but some of the larger sharks attain almost 

 equal size with the biggest cetaceans. The common blue 

 shark, with his twenty-five feet of solid rapacity, would 

 have proved a tough antagonist,.! venture to believe, for 

 the best bred enaliosaurian that ever munched a lias 

 ammonite. I would back our modern carcharodon, who 

 grows to forty feet, against any plesiosaurus that ever 

 swam the Jurassic sea. As for rhinodon, a gigantic shark 

 of the Indian Ocean, he has been actually measured to a 

 length of fifty feet, and is stated often to attain seventy. 

 I will stake my reputation upon it that he would have 

 cleared the secondary seas of their great saurians in less 

 than a century. When we come to add to these enormous 

 marine and terrestrial creatures such other examples as the 

 great snakes, the gigantic cuttle-fish, the grampuses, and 

 manatees, and sea-lions, and sunfish, I am quite prepared 

 fearlessly to challenge any other age that ever existed to enter 

 the lists against our own for colossal forms of animal life. 



Again, it is a point worth noting that a great many of 

 the very big animals which people have in their minds 



